SIMON KEEP & SOUND DESIGN

Simon Keep a sound designer and musician for commercials, film, installations and collaborative works with other artists gave a presentation today. A lecture about sound and how it surrounds us raised lots of interesting ideas to pursue and research further.

Here are some of the concepts that really interested me that Simon presented in his lecture. I aim to consider all of these when thinking about sound and to try and embrace them moving forward in my own work. They are not all going to be applicable but thinking more about sound not just to serve the image as I sometimes do and to think of it as it's own entity sometimes to work in tandem with picture and sometimes to possibly subvert and sometimes to create a higher meaning by working intrinsically with the pictures are all food for thought,

• Sound design being where visual and music meet and sound used to create meaning and give information.
• Phonography which means "sound writing" in Greek is the practice of field recording of sound in locations.
• Sound as an energy that creates vibrations, is projected and then disappears. Unlike film where you can pause on a still to capture the moment with sound you cannot. Sound is a moment and ethereal.
• Sound is hugely influenced by environment. Acoustics, surfaces, space, distance, tone, pitch, melody and beat.
• Importance of sound to create emotion. Music and sound effects be they recorded, library or foley can all be used to create soundscapes. Often the sounds need to be created to exaggerate or enhance "real" sounds.
• How hard it is to describe sound using words. Simon pointed us towards sound designer and film editor Walter Murch and sound theorist Michel Chion for further reading and exploration of ways to approach this.
• The brain processes sound cleverly. For instance the cocktail party effect where you are in a busy cocktail party chatting and listening to those around you but if your voice is mentioned in a far off corner you can pick it out and divert your attention to this. It has been described as latent processing as you are always listening out for sound in the background unaware you are doing it but it can instantly click into action.
• Is sound physical. It can change and define and determine sound, space and place, but is a physical entity?
• Sound affects us psychologically. In a noisy environment it can make us feel both anonymous, claustrophobic or comforted. In a quiet environment it can make us feel exposed, focussed on the sound we emit or even small and overwhelmed with nowhere to hide.
• You can be ambushed by sound. An example being the famous "ear cutting" scene in Reservoir Dogs. The Stealers Wheel "stuck in the middle" track is upbeat, fun and a light-hearted toe tapper. So the music almost aurally ambushes you when you watch the scene heightening the severity of the action.
• Where sound is foreground, background and how it moves from one to the other and the effects this has on the audience.

What was also really interesting however was the "sound walk" we did which really got us thinking about sound and soundscapes around us. It is easy to think of the film and TV work of my practice as primarily visual and "visual arts" but sound plays a huge role in creating mood, tone, atmosphere, creating narratives and character, orientating, creating location soundscapes and working hand in hand (or possibly subverting) to create meaning to audiences.

The use of a hydrophone used for listening to sound under water was also really fascinating when we tried it out at the quay. The sounds listened to are almost other-worldly but what was interesting was that in order to make sense of them you try to apply and pigeon hole them to sound you are familiar with. For instance a scratching sound was probably a creature but did sound like nails on wood and some of the background sound were like rain on windows, a bath running and even machinery working. Sound also travels further underwater so some of the sounds we were listening to may have come from large distances.